At ITEXPO in Vegas, I will be on a panel for Doubling Your Sales in Telecom (SP-07) that is on 8/28/2013 at 9 AM. You do not want to miss this!!!

Session description: It's no secret many telecom and cloud providers are struggling for sales - it's an in increasingly competitive market and businesses are facing shrinking budgets. This session will consider these trends and discuss eight tips any service provider can use to increase sales by as much as 100%.

A memo went out to channel partners this evening from Karl Strohmeyer, GVP, NA Enterprise Sales at Level(3) that Mike Jerich was leaving L3.

"Partners:

It is with mixed feelings that I announce Mike Jerich is leaving Level 3 to pursue an outside opportunity. I say "mixed" as he has shown great leadership integrating and building the program to what it has become today; however, he has an opportunity to further expand his career. I appreciate the strong commitment and expertise he has delivered and wish him all the best in his new chapter.

I just like using acronyms. A VAD is a value added distributor like Tech Data, SYNNEX, Arrow, Ingram Micro and Insight. Like Dell and Microsoft, these companies have to shift their business model to adjust for a decline in hardware and software sales. Everything is going Cloud.

An agent asked me for some advice on what Hosted PBX provider they should look at. I think it is always about local - you need local support, local numbers, and if it is OTT or single location local network.

Then she asked me what questions to ask a cloud vendor. Here are 5 and one-half.

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure," according to news reports. I really liked this phone when it came out. It was ahead of the curve. CloudTC was a Startup Camp Comms candidate.

"People there told me that incoming businesses care more about access to fiber than any other attribute in a building," Susan Crawford said in a phone call. "It's very much like electricity. They want reliable service at a reliable cost." But businesses don't have to check to see if other utilities are available -- they know that electricity, water and phone are available every where. But businesses know that high speed Internet is vital to business success.

Susan Crawford "argues that the airwaves, the cable systems and even access to the Internet itself have been overtaken by monopolists who resist innovation and chronically overcharge consumers. She explained that wired and wireless connections, building blocks of modern life, are now essentially controlled by four companies." TWC, Comcast, ATT, VZ. Who would disagree?

"Everyone needs a coach!" That is how Bill Gates starts his TED Talk. We talk about gamification. What we really need to do is treat business like sports. Hey, the NFL is seeing record revenues, which means they must be doing something right.

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor and outdoor. I have even gotten to train with a couple of the greats (like Misty May and Karch Kiraly). There are at least 10 lessons I have learned in volleyball that work in business.

A great read in INC magazine. What does your customer want? "The reason that they're turning to you and your firm is that they're stuck and need your help. Therefore, you must be able to bring something new to the table."

There have been some interesting articles lately. I can't get to all of them, but here are some good reads.

Death of the Telecom VAR in 2013 - How an entire sub-industry will be wiped out in the next 24 months by Jeff Hawkes. "Traditional telecom VARs or value-added reseller businesses- those that derive the majority of their revenue from the sale of on-premise PBX equipment to business customers- have ridden one of the longest product life cycle waves in recent technological history and combined with an emerging threat from hosted phone providers and a professional background that leaves most ill-prepared to run a business larger than a few employees is threatening to wipe-out or dramatically alter an entire sub-industry in the next 24 months." He writes like me.

UNSI has been in the news lately. It was originally American Broadband, reselling DSL nationally. Then it changed its name to United Network Services, Inc. and became a facilities-based carrier, with 18 Points of Presence (PoPs) and interconnections (and NNIs) to over 150 carriers in the US (including cable, DSL, wireless, CLEC and ILEC). "UNSi's partners are able to leverage the relationships with these carriers, paired with the cost savings and convenience of working with a single partner, under one invoice."

When I heard Mark Sanborn call business a thinking man's spot, it made me smile and then think. Oddly, most of these news items have all fallen in my lap today. It made me re-think how the value added distributors (VADs), like Tech Data, were going to morph.

Tech Data is the 2nd largest VAD at $26 Billion after Ingram Micro (at $37.8 Billion in sales), but TD is located in Tampa Bay, where I reside.

A couple of small ISP/CLEC companies received letters from Verizon Wholesale stating that VZ Wholesale is outsourcing their puny accounts to an agency, Alliance Wholesale Agents, LLC.

This would be huge win for any agency, since VZ waffles over the channel all the time.

However, this agency is a Dover, DE company formed in January with no website and some goofy VoIP phone numbers. It points to either a scam or VZ Wholesale, specifically Kathryn Kalajian,who signed the letter, didn't check to the agency out.

In 2009, when Robert McDowell was nominated to be an FCC Chairman, the competitive telecom world cheered, because McDowell used to work at COMPTEL. They thought that Bush had given them a little help in the FCC. Oh, how very wrong they were. All the help in the FCC came from Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein.

One more volleyball sport reference if you don't mind. In volleyball, serving is the only time that you have total control over the play and the action. The two factors to improving your serving are visualization and practice.

Obviously, the more you practice, the better your muscle memory gets, the better the serve gets.